The primary purpose of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) is to get content to users faster. This has never been more important in the era where a response taking more than a couple of seconds can lead to a user abandoning your web site. For example, we all know that…

It’s hardly news that modern business is taking place primarily on the Internet. Regardless of its size, every business will lose some of its power if it doesn’t have an online presence. The Internet space is large enough to accommodate countless businesses and ventures, but its vast size is not…

Let’s start by going back in time to the 1980s. This was when one of the most widely used protocols on the Internet – DNS –was developed. In case you are new to DNS or need a refresher, take a look at this detailed post on DNS before reading further. DNS…

Waiting for a webpage to load can be painful—but not knowing how to proceed when the page is “stuck” is a nightmare. User satisfaction is dependent on website performance and ease of use – a slow loading website has a negative impact on end-user experience and directly affect conversion rates.…

It’s a Saturday afternoon: An email from a customer drove me to start troubleshooting an issue they were experiencing with Amazon S3. They were experiencing random high wait time, usually an indication of a problem with communication back to some sort of an origin system. Should’ve been a piece of…

Cash may be king in the real world, but cache is king in the world of the internet. From DNS record TTLs, to HTTP Max-age headers, caching at different levels makes the internet faster and our lives easier. One technology which has contributed extensively over the years in improving web performance is…

A multi-CDN service that combines multiple CDN providers into a single network is a common and effective way to speed up your web applications for users anywhere in the world. This strategy can also boost failover support in case one of the CDNs you’re using goes down. But even a…

In order to deliver a complete web experience to your users, it’s important to utilize the services of a reliable Content Delivery Network. The basic promise of the traditional CDN product is to provide better and faster web performance for end users by serving static assets from the edge (it’s…

I recently came across a very interesting post about CDN testing by Jonathan Klein, someone I respect tremendously in the Web Performance world. During his tests with Webpagetest he was unable to “see” the value provided by the CDN on his site. I wanted to follow-up on his blog…

While monitoring the performance of the Internet Retailer Top 50 Retailers this past Holiday Season, we also tracked what third party vendors and CDNs were utilized and measured their impact on each website. The data collected not only offered insights on what third parties and CDNs are most utilized, but…